Angenommen, published in 1989 in German and this April available in English for the first time, proposes twenty-two scenarios that invite readers to create accompanying images or clips, as author Vilém Flusser advocates. Flusser (1920-1991) was a Czech-Brazilian media philosopher who wrote widely across many different topics and in four different languages. Anke Finger, a long-time expert, embarked on the translation of What If? Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images with renowned translator and previous collaborator Kenneth Kronenberg and invited the famous poet Kenneth Goldsmith to compose an afterword. According to the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, the book is

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter

Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future.” What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, and serves as both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

The project was first presented at the 2021 “Radical Futures” symposium, co-organized by Anke Finger and Christoph Ernst (University of Bonn) and supported by the UConn Humanities Institute; and it is part of the Greenhouse Studios “Flusser Vision” project.